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Entrepreneur Tradermarks ;-) Smiley Emoticon

Posted on December 12th, 2008 by admin in Domain News | 3 Comments »

A Russian entrepreneur has trademarked the emoticon – or combination of punctuation characters – used to convey a wink in text messages and e-mail.

Oleg Teterin, president of the mobile ad company Superfone, said Thursday he doesn’t plan on tracking down individual users following the decision by the federal patent agency but will keep track of corporations trying to make profit without the permission of the trademark owner.

“I want to highlight that this is only directed at corporations, companies that are trying to make a profit without the permission of the trademark holder,” he said in comments to NTV.

Teterin intends to send legal warnings to companies that use the symbol without his permission.

Teterin continued to say that other similar emoticons, or or in particular, that resemble his tradermarked emoticon could also fall under his ownership.

Other Russian web entrepreneurs were not impressed by this development NTV reports:

Imagine the next wise-guy who trademarks the 33 letters of the Russian alphabet and then says anyone who uses the Russian alphabet has to send him money. It’s absurd,” said Alexander Manis, the director of a broadband internet and mobile company.

Interestingly, this is not the first time someone has tried to lay claim to this emoticon in Russia. In 2005 a court in St Petersburg ruled in favour of German giant Siemens following a lawsuit by a Russian man who claimed he held the trademark.

This story was sourced from sfgate.

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